Paper Title
Training Migrant Workers to Become a Multinational Company’s Cadres of Overseas Subsidiaries
Abstract
With the development of internationalization, many companies have established foreign subsidiaries and sent expatriates to manage overseas operations and integrate systems and cultures between subsidiaries and headquarters.Except for personal and family factors, the number of employees in parent companies who have willingness and qualifications to work and live abroad has declined over years. In addition, employees who are willing to accept international assignments are mostly young and inexperienced workers. For this reason, multinational companies have to seek alternatives and training and developing migrant workers has become one of the solutions. That is so-called localization.
This research tooka company located in Taichung, Taiwan as a case study and collected data through in-depth interviews. This company has 49 production sites, and most of them are dispersed in Southeast Asia. The parent company has hired migrant workers from three countries, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Since migrant workers can stay in Taiwan for a maximum of 12 years, the company seeks to train and develop their foreign workers during their stay in Taiwan for 3 to 6 years. In this way, the company will acquire a cadre of local nationals working as their overseas managers.
Interviewed conducted with recruiters and the human resource (HR) executive revealed that the multinational company and the recruiting companies had same philosophy and good coordination. However, for the localization to be successful, production site managers play an important role. Therefore, the HR executive needs to share the idea of localization with the site managers and trains them first to become trainers and developer of migrant workers.
Keywords - Internationalization, Expatriate, Localization, Migrant Workers.